Diablo II single player questions

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tried maxing out sacrifice, and he is hauling ass! everything is getting ripped to pieces!

thx man!

 

Oh god I hate these. My Meteorb breezed through Act 4 and had no trouble at all against Diablo (the only boss that ever gave me difficulty in Nightmare or Hell was Duriel) but these blood lords must have killed me a few times. Teleport is the key here, but even with that it's easy to make a mistake and get your Sorceress killed very quickly.

 

The only reason I thought of that was he said he had 20 unused skill points. The only way you can be in Act III Hell and have 20 unused skill points is if you had not invested in one of the four main skills.

Finished Act IV last night with the paladin. The Pandemonium Fortress was painful, as always with the Oblivion Knights. I definitely died at least twice, maybe three times. And my merc got killed by the aforementioned blood lords right before Diablo spawned.

Since my merc was the same level as me and wouldn't get any XPs for the Diablo fight anyway, I decided against going back to town to revive him before the fight, because he'd probably die again anyway. Besides, I built the character to take out bosses and that's what he does really well. I made Diablo my ***** in record time last night. With 90% lightning resistance and damage reduction gear, the Pink Lightning Bolt of Death was nothing. My pally just paused to put on some sun tan lotion before continuing. The fire attack thing he does was even more laugable, with 90% fire resistance and a Dwarf Star that has fire absorb on it, it literally did nothing.

Unfortunately, he didn't drop anything of particular interest, just a bunch of rares. This paladin is not a particularly good magic finder, as most of his gear is dedicated to killing things. He only has about 80% mf, and the only thing I can see increasing is the helm by 24% when I socket it in Act V. So I doubt his mf will even be much beyond 100%.

 

I haven't acquired a merc yet for my druid, any recommendations?

I finished Act III on nightmare today, man I hate act 3. Worst of all I forgot to fetch the brain at first and had to return later to the flayer dungeon. On the plus side got skin of the vipermagi which is a good piece of armor and also the unique demonleather gloves. I can't recall the name right now but they gave a great deal of poison resistance. All my resistances are near fifties now so that department has much improved. Had to take off my magic finding boots and gloves for now since I need all the resistances I can get. My shield and belt are still pretty crappy though, and I would not mind getting a better primary weapon before heading to hell difficulty.

 

If you are primarily a shapeshifter (either wolf or bear) I'd take an Act II offensive merc for the might aura. If you are any other kind of druid, I'd take an Act II combat merc for the holy freeze aura.

Potentially outstanding - what is the resist all (minimum is 20, max is 35)

 

Only 25 to all, still a very good item though and will probably last on one character or the other for the rest of the game.

And yeah the druid's a werewolf. I can't believe how much I've forgotten since the last time I played. How is it with socketed items like boots, do the effects of helms, armors or weapons apply when inserting runes or gems?

 

nice one dmc.

and my pally is now in act 5, and made quite short work of dia as well, not worth the trouble to run him though, with all the iron maiden in the area...

i am doing meph runs to try to find the herald of zakarum though, i found out that i can just use vigor and run past everything besides the monster right in front of meph, saves a lot of time

 

One major omission here: Whirlwind is a rather special case when it comes to improving its rate of attack. The only thing helping there is IAS on the weapon itself, anything else is plain ignored. However, you don't suffer the normal diminishing returns on the IAS percentage.

In case of Hone Sundan, the base weapon speed is zero, but with three Shael runes it (just barely) reaches the final -60 speed breakpoint, aka 4 frame WW.

Incidentally, that's also why the IK maul owns, despite its rather lackluster 200% enhanced damage. It's a base 10 speed weapon, with 40 built-in IAS and two open sockets, making the -60 speed breakpoint possible with just two fervor jewels. Not even Breath of the Dying reaches that with its otherwise impressive 60% IAS, you'd need a zero base speed weapon to plug it in - which there is none available in the two-handed Mace category. (Of course BotD wins with its ethereal bonus and much higher enhanced damage percentage, but 6 frames vs 4 frames per attack favors IK maul by 50% on the other side of the equation.)

Also,

Imbues are just plain old rares as far as level requirements are concerned, it's only crafted items that carry the extra penalty of having full affix lvl = req level ratio. All other items are at 75% of highest affix level on the item.

That's why you'll find a gambled +2 skills amulet only requires lvl 67 while a crafted dito would require level 90. (The affix level for +2 skills is 90.)

 

You cannot socket boots. Only helms, body armor, shields and weapons are available in socketed varieties. Things like boots, belts, jewelry, and gloves cannot be socketed, not even if you use the socket quest. The basic rules of the socket quest are:

1. The item must be able to have sockets
2. If it's a white (normal or superior) item, you will get the maximum number of sockets that item can possibly get. (The only reason you'd use a socket quest on a normal item is if you planned on making a runeword with it.)
3. If it's a blue (magic) item, you will get either one or two sockets, with an even 50-50 probability of each showing up.
4. If it's a rare (yellow), green (set), or gold (unique) item it will always only get one socket.

You're right. And I remembered that as soon as you said it. Nonetheless, I was planning on going 3X shael with the Hone Sudan anyway. It just turns out that's the only way I was getting to the last whirlwind break point.

I was the same way. While my meteor did considerably more damage than fireball, I could get off several fireballs in the time it would take me to get off two meteors, and there was the added benefit of having the monsters not move between when I shot it and the hit landing. There were two instances when meteor was still worthwhile: 1) Act Bosses and any other time you're fighting a unique, big, high life total monster (like Hephasto, Izual, etc.) Even in these cases you wouldn't use meteor exclusively, but would alternate between meteor and fireball. 2) Meteor is actually more useful than fireball in areas like the one you mentioned above where you are fighting clusters of fire and cold immunes. The fire immunes "shield" the cold immunes from being hit with fireballs for the most part, whereas the meteor comes from above, so as long as the creature is within the area of effect, it takes damage.

 

Hmmm... Thing are getting hard for my paladin in Act V hell. I'm really struggling to try and get through Nihlathak's lair. I may need to get lucky and get an instance where the claw vipers don't spawn on the bottom level. Even though I can usually survive their attacks if there is only one or two (through damage reduction and high blocking), my merc cannot, and without my merc my damage really suffers.

I haven't even got to Nihlathak yet, and I imagine his corpse explosion is going to be really bad, at least the physical damage part. The one thing I have going for me is that CE is half fire and half physical damage, and with 90% fire resistance, and a Dwarf Star with fire absorb, I'm nearly immune to fire damage.

 

My paladin may need to re-enter temporary retirement. I have successfully defeated Nihlathak, and I even bested the Ancients. (The battles are always anti-climatic with a boss killer, as the bosses are typically the easy part. It's getting the boss in the first place that is the challenge.)

However, this is gonig to be a long hard slog. Those boss packs of blood lords (the minatuar type things) will F- your stuff up. It seems like every single one of those boss packs spawns either cursed, extra strong, extra fast, or some combination thereof. Which means it's insta-death if you character runs into them. I don't care if your belt is filled with full rejevenation potions - they can two hit kill you a lot of times. I couldn't even get through level 1 of the worldstone before I gave up. I'll try again tonight, but if blood lords are a standard spawn (and I think they are) I don't know how I'm going to get through these levels.

 

Arreat's Face is generally considered to be the barb helm you want. Demonhorn's Edge is nice and all, but it defintely comes in a distant second. So yes, it goes without saying that if you make a barb that will be part of the equipment list.

Found a Stone of Jordan yet? I (still) have not got a Raven Frost.

 

Found Silkweave boots, which would be nice for a caster. I'm thinking about starting a sorcerer. They being generally better at magic finding and easiest to play. So I'm thinking about putting my druid temporeraly on hold, since I'm having some difficulties with Bhaal's minions in the worldstone keep. I'm still not using a merc though, since I found the might merc to be quite useless since I'm using the heart of wolverine aynhow and auras don't seem to stack.

The odds of finding a SOJ are criminally small, I found only one (as a drop) during a very long time of Diablo II playing. Of course they used to be pretty common since in the old days all gamblescreens had one unique item among them and SOJ was therefore not all that difficult to find.

 

Two points here: Auras WILL stack so long as they aren't the same aura. For example, my paladin uses the holy freeze aura, and my merc uses might, so my paladin is under the effect of both might and holy freeze. The only way auras don't stack is if it's the exact same aura, so if both my merc and I were using the might aura, the only one that would go into effect was whoever had the higher level in might, and the other aura would not effect anything.

However, all of this is moot, as the Spirit of Barbs is not an aura. All of the spirit pets that a druid can summon are actual summons that can be killed like any other summons the druid casts. So even if auras did NOT stack it wouldn't effect anything with having both a merc and a spirit pet. (Heck, even if you aren't seeing a big enough difference in damage output to justify having a might merc tag along, go get yourself a holy freeze merc. Frozen monsters move at half speed and are much easier to kill.)

They are certainly more rare than they were at one time, but I have found many SoJs. Unique rings and amulets (and set rings and amulets, but we'll limit the example to uniques for simplicity) have a rarity value attached to them. What that rarity value represents is the relative chance you have of getting that particular set or unique item if the computer decides to drop a set or unique ring or amulet. The number is usually expressed as a numeric value out of 10,000 unique drops. So, it might say Raven Frost: rarity = 740/10000 (and I completely made that number up - I have no idea the exact rarity of a Raven Frost is).

The rarity number pre-supposes that the monster dropping the unique ring is high enough in level to drop any unique ring in the game. Obviously, If a monster cannot drop certain unique ring(s), the relative chance of the rings he can drop goes up. The point of all this is that (based on rarity values) you are far more likely to get a Nagelring when you get a unique ring to drop, irrepsective of your level and what monster you're killing. Even if a monster is capable of dropping any unique ring in the game, there's still a 40-something percent chance that it's a Nagelring. In normal difficulty, where most monsters are of insufficient level to drop some of the unique rings, the chance of getting a Nagelring is upwards of 70 percent. If you happen to get a unique ring to drop in the Blood Mor of act I, Normal, there is a 100% chance that it is a Nagelring.

But let's get back to the Stone of Jordan. As it turns out, the Stone of Jordan, Raven Frost, and Dwarf Star have the exact same rarity number. There is about a 6% chance for each of those rings to drop, assuming all uniques are possible. Furthermore, the SoJ has an item level somewhat lower than a DS or RF, so there are some monsters (like Nightmare Andariel) who can drop a SoJ, but cannot drop a DS or RF (which obviously increases your chances for a SoJ drop). So a SoJ is not excessively rare - unless you consider all those other rings equally rare. In fact, the SoJ is a heck of a lot more common than the rarest of unique rings - the Bul Kathos ring has a rarity that makes it drop only 1.2% of the time. Further, since the item level for BK is so high, most monsters before late nightmare cannot drop it at all making it's relative frequency even lower.

EDIT: I should also directly point out instead of just hint that Nightmare Andariel is the boss you want to run to get a SoJ. As a boss, she has decent odds of dropping a unique. Furthermore, she is high enough level to drop a SoJ, but not such a high level that she can drop a lot of the other unique rings. That being said, there's no great place to get a SoJ, because no matter what you are killing, the highest odds of any unique ring will always be Nagelring.

 

Holy Freeze is an offensive aura that damages the enemies so not stacking would be pretty obvious there. However I tried to look at the damage with and without the might aura and it changed nowhere. I'll have to try and test it over once again to see if there really is a difference. Also while the spirits are summons, they are summons coupled with an aura, and the aura then affects the spirit, other summons/companions and the players. So if the auras would not stack I assume it would not stack either.

I wonder if this has allways been so, since I allways had several raven frosts and dwarf stars but only found one natural SOJ. Might be a question of luck too, I suppose.

EDIT: Sorry for doubting your knowledge, I think I know the problem now. The aura seems to have been thorns and not might. No wonder my damage did not improve.

 

For the merc, I would do the following: See what your damage is before you hire a merc. The merc's aura doesn't activate automatically - he has to actually enter combat for a bit before it "turns on". Once it does you should see your character's damage output increase. Then cast Spirit of Barbs which should stack (additively, not multiplied) with might.

There certainly is an element of luck with finding unique rings. Even though the odds are exactly the same for SoJ, DS, and RF, I have a few SoJ and no RF, while dmc has found several RF and no SoJ.